In the new issue of Regulation, economist Pierre Lemieux argues that the recent oil price decline is at least partly the result of increased supply from the extraction of shale oil. The increased supply allows the economy to produce more goods, which benefits some people, if not all of them. Thus, contrary to some commentary in the press, cheaper oil prices cannot harm the economy as a whole.

Two long wars, chronic deficits, the financial crisis, the costly drug war, the growth of executive power under Presidents Bush and Obama, and the revelations about NSA abuses, have given rise to a growing libertarian movement in our country – with a greater focus on individual liberty and less government power. David Boaz’s newly released The Libertarian Mind is a comprehensive guide to the history, philosophy, and growth of the libertarian movement, with incisive analyses of today’s most pressing issues and policies.

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Charles W. Calomiris and Peter Ireland, two distinguished economists and friends, wrote an edifying piece in The Wall Street Journalon 19 February 2015. That said, their article contains a great inflation canard.

They write that “Fed officials should remind markets that monetary policy takes time to work its way through the economy—what Milton Friedman famously referred to as “long and variable lags”—and on inflation.” That’s now a canard.

For recent evidence, we have to look no further than the price changes that followed the bursting of multiple asset bubbles in 2008. The price changes that occurred in the second half of 2008 were truly breathtaking. The most important price in the world — the U.S. dollar-euro exchange rate — moved from 1.60 to 1.25. Yes, the greenback soared by 28% against the euro in three short months. During that period, gold plunged from $975/oz to $735/oz and crude oil fell from $139/bbl to $67/bbl.

What was most remarkable was the fantastic change in the inflation picture. In the U.S., for example, the year-over-year consumer price index (CPI) was increasing at an alarming 5.6% rate in July 2008. By February 2009, that rate had dropped into negative territory, and by July 2009, the CPI was contracting at a -2.1% rate. This blew a hole in a well-learned dogma: that changes in inflation follow changes in policy, with long and variable lags.

Milton Friedman was certainly correct about the period covered in the classic, which he co-authored with Anna J. Schwartz: A Monetary History of the United States, 1867-1960. Recall that the world of that era was one in which the fixed exchange rates ruled the roost. That’s not today’s world. Indeed, many important currencies now float. Since the world adopted a flexible exchange-rate “non-system”, changes in inflation can strike like a lightning bolt.

Continuing the media firestorm of the last few days, George Stephanopoulos spent over 11 minutes today on ABC’s “This Week” browbeating Indiana Gov. Mike Pence over the meaning of the Religious Freedom Restoration Act the governor had just signed, and the governor spent the entire 11 minutes refusing to say what the Act plainly says, that individuals and businesses, in the name of religious liberty, may discriminate against members of the LGBT community by, for example, declining to provide bakery or florist services for gay weddings.

Such today is the dishonesty of our politics, on both sides, that those who defend religious liberty cannot or will not speak plainly, while those who defend anti-discrimination measures—like Bill Clinton, who signed the federal Religious Freedom Restoration Act, and Barack Obama, who was an Illinois state senator when that state’s religious freedom act was passed unanimously—cannot bring themselves to say that they are limiting religious liberty—assuming the media would ever ask them to say that.

Doubtless spurred by the upcoming NCAA “Final Four” games in Indianapolis, we have here, of course, the continuation of the hysteria that followed the Supreme Court’s Hobby Lobby decision last year, which upheld the right of the deeply religious owners of that chain of stores to refrain from paying for abortifacients for their employees, as was required under the administration’s interpretation of Obamacare. (See Cato’s brief in that case, and some of my thoughts on the issue here and here.) “Hysterical” is no overstatement: ABC News reports today that Seattle’s mayor wants to prohibit city employees from traveling to Indiana. Why stop there? Prohibit travel across the U.S., where the federal law is in force.

In truth, we have in this Act the analogue of what we see every day in the area of free speech, which the left assiduously and rightly defends—but this is religion, and for the left, that’s another matter. Just as we defend a person’s right to say what he pleases, which is not the same as defending what he says, so too here we can defend a person’s right to discriminate on the basis of his religious beliefs without defending those beliefs or the actions they may require of a believer. As one more sign of how modern liberals have turned the Constitution on its head, they would have the statutory rights created by our anti-discrimination law trump the constitutional rights the First Amendment was ratified to protect. I discuss those issues in much greater depth here.

Medicaid, the entitlement program for low-income Americans jointly funded by the state and federal government, represents about 25 percent of state budgets. Federal funding represents more than half (57 percent) of that amount, and that funding is now being threatened by Obamacare.

In what seems like déjà-vu all over again, Maine’s Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS) is pursuing a lawsuit to prevent this sort of federal coercion.

Here’s the scoop: In 2009, the American Recovery & Reinvestment Act (ARRA) offered states stimulus funds if they agreed to a maintenance-of-effort (“MOE”) provision that required them to maintain Medicaid-eligibility standards at July 2008 levels through December 2010. MaineCare, Maine’s Medicaid program, accepted those funds and the accompanying MOE provision. In relevant part, MaineCare covered low-income individuals ages 18 to 20 in 2008 — even though Medicaid doesn’t require states to include non-pregnant, non-disabled 18- to 20-year olds — so that MOE provision required Maine to continue to do so through 2010. Then the Affordable Care Act came along and added its own MOE provision, which required states to “freeze” eligibility levels until 2019 or risk losing all federal Medicaid funding.

When the ACA took effect on March 23, 2010, Maine was still bound by the ARRA’s MOE requirements, and thus had to continue to cover 18- to 20-year olds for an additional nine years. In August 2012, however, the Maine DHHS sought to drop this coverage. The federal Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) rejected Maine’s position regarding alleged inconsistencies between the MOE provisions.

On appeal, Maine argued that the ACA’s MOE provision is unconstitutionally coercive under the Spending Clause, that it unconstitutionally applies retroactively to ARRA MOE provisions, and that it violates Maine’s right to equal sovereignty. Nevertheless, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit affirmed the CMS decision, so Maine now seeks Supreme Court review.

The Supreme Court heard arguments on Wednesday in Michigan v. EPA, asking whether it was unreasonable for the Environmental Protection Agency to ignore costs in determining the appropriateness of regulating mercury emissions from power plants. The EPA’s proposed regulations are expected to cost the coal industry a whopping $9.6 billion, but only offer a meager $500,000 to $6 million in public health benefits.

Cato filed an amicusbrief in the case that focuses on why the EPA chose to ignore costs in developing these regulations. It turns out that EPA could achieve its goal of comprehensively regulating utility emissions only if it ignores the costs. That in turn allowed the EPA to single out power plants – which it couldn’t do under other programs, and to avoid working through the states – as the other programs require. This strategy amounts to little more than a clever trick to circumvent statutory limits on the EPA’s own authority.

In effect, the EPA is exploiting nearly harmless levels of mercury emissions as a Trojan horse – an excuse to regulate all power plant emissions, even ones that are covered by other programs that deny EPA the ability to regulate in this fashion.

Chief Justice Roberts picked up on this point from our brief when he questioned the Solicitor General extensively as to the radical disparity between costs and benefits (see discussion starting p.59 here). He also asked pointed questions regarding the EPA’s attempt at making an “end run” around restrictions on the Clean Air Act.

You Ought to Have a Look is a feature from the Center for the Study of Science posted by Patrick J. Michaels and Paul C. (“Chip”) Knappenberger. While this section will feature all of the areas of interest that we are emphasizing, the prominence of the climate issue is driving a tremendous amount of web traffic. Here we post a few of the best in recent days, along with our color commentary.

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More evidence this week that high-end forecasts of coming climate change are unsupportable and Americans’ worry about environmental threats, including global warming, is declining. Maybe the general public isn’t as out of touch with the science as has been advertised?

First up is a new paper by Bjorn Stevens from Germany’s Max Plank Institute for Meteorology that finds the magnitude of the cooling effect from anthropogenic aerosol emissions during the late 19th and 20th century was less than currently believed, which eliminates the support for the high-end negative estimates (such as those included in the latest assessment of the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, IPCC). Or, as Stevens puts it “that aerosol radiative forcing is less negative and more certain than is commonly believed.”

This is important, because climate models rely on the cooling effects from aerosol emissions to offset a large part of the warming effect from greenhouse gas emissions. If you think climate models produce too much warming now, you ought to see how hot they become when they don’t include aerosol emissions. The IPCC sums up the role of aerosols this way:

Despite the large uncertainty range, there is a high confidence that aerosols have offset a substantial portion of [greenhouse gas] global mean forcing.

The new Stevens’ result—that the magnitude of the aerosol forcing is less—means the amount of greenhouse gas-induced warming must also be less; which means that going forward we should expect less warming from future greenhouse gas emissions than climate models are projecting.

Researcher Nic Lewis, who has done a lot of good recent work on climate sensitivity, was quick to realize the implications of the Stevens’ results. In a blog post over at Climate Audit, Lewis takes us through his calculations as to what the new aerosols cooling estimates mean for observational determinations of the earth’s climate sensitivity.

Over at the Washington Post, Radley Balko details a recent Fourth Circuit ruling overturning an award for a father whose son was shot and killed in a military-style SWAT raid after marijuana residue was found in an outside garbage bag. A jury awarded the father $250,000 after it was shown that the police failed to comply with their obligation to knock and announce their presence before barging in and that they lied about several aspects of the raid.

Without repeating the entirety of Balko’s excellent analysis, a particularly troubling aspect of the ruling is the nonchalant way in which the Fourth Circuit judges, even in dissent, treat the militarized raid over marijuana residue and dispense with any suggestion that such escalated violence is constitutionally questionable:

Let’s first start by noting one very important issue that is not in dispute—whether the massive amount of force the police brought to bear in this case was reasonable under the Fourth Amendment. As far as the federal courts are concerned, it was. As Judge Pamela Harris points out in her dissent, “The point here, to be clear, is not to take issue with the Officers’ decision to execute a search warrant based on marijuana traces by way of a military-style nighttime raid.”

Harris is correct. The courts long ago decided that dangerous, punishing SWAT-style raids to search for pot—even when there is no evidence of distribution—are reasonable under the Fourth Amendment. A lawsuit arguing otherwise will be promptly tossed.

Balko then points out that such behavior is precisely what the Fourth Amendment was designed to prevent:

A new report from the Drug Policy Alliance details a steep decline in the number of marijuana arrests in Colorado and remarks on the beneficial effects.

The key points:

Since 2010, marijuana possession charges are down by more than 90%, marijuana cultivation charges are down by 96%, and marijuana distribution charges are down by 99%.

The number of marijuana possession charges in Colorado courts has decreased by more than 25,000 since 2010—from 30,428 in 2010 to just 1,922 in 2014.

According to raw data from the National Incident-Based Reporting System, drug-related incidents are down 23% since 2010, based on a 53% drop in marijuana-related incidents.

In 2010 the top five Colorado counties for marijuana possession cases were El Paso, Jefferson, Adams, Larimer, and Boulder. Marijuana possession cases in those counties all dropped by at least 83% from 2010 to 2014.

Marijuana distribution charges for young men of color did not increase, to the relief of racial justice advocates wary of a “net-widening” effect following legalization. The black rate for distribution incidents dropped from 87 per 100,000 in 2012 to 25 per 100,000 in 2014.

Racial disparities for still-illegal and mostly petty charges persist for black people when compared to white people, primarily because of the specific increase of charges for public use combined with the disproportionate rates of police contact in communities of color. The marijuana arrest rate for black people in 2014 was 2.4 times higher than the arrest rates for white people, just as it was in 2010.

The report also reveals a decline in synthetic marijuana arrests, presumably because people are less likely to use synthetic marijuana when marijuana itself is no longer criminalized.

According to Art Way, Colorado state director of the Drug Policy Alliance:

It’s heartening to see that tens of thousands of otherwise law-abiding Coloradans have been spared the travesty of getting handcuffed or being charged for small amounts of marijuana. By focusing on public health rather than criminalization, Colorado is better positioned to address the potential harms of marijuana use, while diminishing many of the worst aspects of the war on drugs.